12 Oct 2001 ::
Several days ago, as planned, I found a
teacher of Romanian. As to me, it's awful to
loose an opportunity to learn something new,
since I find Knowledge the main motive force
for myself. The more so, that living in
the language environment, it's pretty easy to
learn a language... [ more.. ]

10 Jun 2002 ::
Have you ever had a dream, my dear readers? A modest, not so modest or a
very perverse one? I bet you had. To touch silicon of Pamela Anderson,
or to earn one millon dollars developing software, without selling
heroine or killing someone.. I had a dream too... [ more.. ]

12 Mar 2002 ::
Finally, the show went on! Last week the "argc & argv" magazine from
Kiev published my article named "A little bit of black magic in UNIX"
about daemons in UNIX-like systems. The magazine itself is specialized
for programmers, new issues are published every two months... [ more.. ]

I think everyone has already heard about Redhat 7.3 - a new version of
the popular Linux distribution. Since ISO images are available for
downloading at the vendor's ftp (it cannot be other way), the next day
our sysadmin burned 3 CDs for me. And when finally I brought them home,
I decided to give its installer's upgrade option another chance.
Previous bad exprerience I had with it, was when I tried to upgrade RH
6.2 to 7.0. It resulted into programs' configuration getting screwed up,
and libraries incompatibility errors. Finished this in a way non-Linux
way: I removed 6.2 and installed 7.0 from scratch feeling myself like a
"happy" Windows user. Nevertheless, upgrade from 7.1 to 7.3 left only
good impressions. First I booted from the first CD, selected my
favourite text mode, and Russian language interface. It was a surprise
to see Russian descriptions for the majority of packages how they
appeared in the installation/upgrad dialog. Till now had no time to try
to get a clue with it. I wonder if the installer has a list of
descriptions in various languages, or it's a feature of the new RPM
format which allows to give packages localized names. After the upgrade
finished, I only had to issue find /etc -name "*rpmsave" -print
and to get the updated configuration in order. The point is that old
configuration files are renamed to *.rpmsave so that not to replace them
with new ones from packages of fresh versions of software.

I already told you about the site of
my Romanian colleague Mihai Bazon. Visiting it several days ago I found
a new
article of his, about pseudo-RPC in JavaScript using iframe and div
elements. Quite a useful trick, if you have a need to reload only parts
of pages to show up-to-date information.

If you are cuorious to test new programs with nice and useful textmode
user interface, here is Orpheus for your attention. It's a program which
I wrote, as it usually happens, after a plenty of unsuccessful attempts
to find a useful textmode audio player with the following features:
support for mp3 and cd tracks, with a possibility to combine the both
types within a play list in arbitrary order, support for cddb (internet
music cd albums database) and reading mp3 tags decoding them from
win1251 to koi8 when needed. Since there were no releases yet, tar.gz
and rpm packages of the program are available here. Will be very glad to
receive feedbacks and bug-reports. The latter helps to improve software
stability a lot.

Finally, since today till Sunday yours sincerelly is in Carpathians, in
the Peatra Neamt area, the place is called Bicaz. If something
intresting happens, it will be written about here.